Beggar on Horseback & Conflict
Conflict is an unavoidable part of the Christian's life, for we are always pitted against sin. Scripture often frames sin as something we should fight against, the Christian life as one prepared for and engaging in conflict. [2 Samuel 22; Psalm 59; Ephesians 6:10-20; 1 Peter 5:6-14; Revelation 15] Neil McRae of Beggar on Horseback has to fight everything, it seems, in his pursuit to keep his head above the moral waters, and the Christian's life is not different; we are assailed on all sides and from all places with sin. Beggar on Horseback pits Neil against many different basic conflict structures at once to create this sense of ubiquity of struggle, and for the Christian, these all represent different manifestations of sin.
The portrayal of the sins of progression with Neil's conflict with technology – specifically the cutting-edge – is subtle but still present within the play. Of course, radios are no longer cutting-edge in the twentieth century, but at the time of the play, they were quite bold and new. The radio is a subtle presence in Neil’s illusions. It represents the progression towards the new epoch, the contemporary times. The most prominent scene with one is in the last stretch of the first part, where McRae kills the entire Cady family – almost the entire play is in delirium, keep in mind. Homer, the constant crank, is working on a radio in the illusion.
"HOMER: I've got the radio fixed! Listen!
RADIO: Stock market reports! Stock market reports! (Ad infinitum)"[1]
This radio haunts a lot of Neil's dream, sitting just in the corner. All it cares about is stocks – not even genuine business, just stocks. It looks on a world at the brink of the Great Depression, a view that sees the precipice if not the fall that it necessitates, a fall into a Depression that would be only the beginning of a new epoch. It is a world that has forsaken the worship of Christ for the worship of worship, for the piety of product, the veneration of consumption – all things Albert and Cynthia deliver to Neil as well. "It never was me that you cared about – only the music,"[2] Neil remarks to Cynthia in her plot with Albert to make him marry Gladys, a rich suitor with a huge inheritance; Neil is certainly far off the mark and overgeneralizing Cynthia in his own distress, which is wrong, but his general point of becoming mere content for his fellow man is accurate. It is a view of the coming reality of America, a reality Neil has conflict with in the play.
Reality itself is warped by sin as well. The play is formatted in such a way that the entire time, the audience are pushed and pulled along with Neil. The scenes are difficult to follow along with and yet obvious in their implications. They're fast and crazy but have a terrifying logic to them. The horror is obvious at a glance, but the further you look into it, the more horrifying things become. It is like this growing as a Christian, for every time you believe you know the depths of your own sin, you discover something deeper, another passage way, seemingly impossible in its grotesque nature. Neil is pushed deeper into both his own sin and the sin of the world throughout the play, and he finds it absurd. It is absurd. Reality apart from Christ is absurd, and that is the reality Neil is being presented with in his dream. A good concise view of the way the play shows reality in such circumstances is the prison where Cady makes artists work. Visitors come to see all of the artists, including Neil:
"NEIL: Oh yes – [I also write] mammies, sweeties, and fruit songs. The ideas are brought up from the inspiration department every hour on the hour. After I turn them into music they are taken to the purifying department, and then to the testing and finishing rooms. They are then packed for shipment.
FIRST VISITOR: A wonderful system!
THIRD VISITOR: I should say so!"[3]
The reality of sin is crushing. At the base of everything, the world seeks only that which is evil and absurd. Neil has been enslaved in a world where he is forced to do evil – that is, it seems that way until the near the end of the dream: "It [his cage] was never locked! (He steps out and closes the door.)"[4] The audience must remember that, even with all extenuating circumstances, Neil is the one who calls Gladys and tells her he wants to marry her. Neil, too, is delusional. The whole world without Christ is delusional. It is Christ who allows such obvious freedoms as an unlocked door to our jail cell, and we should not take that as granted without Him. We don't literally lock people up and force them to produce things, but generally speaking society is built around producing and consuming. Sin does not view the genuine and the vulnerable as worth anything and so discards them, leaving only the artificial and the ironic.
Of course, Neil is at conflict with society; of course, society is plagued by sin. Even if the entire planet submitted to Christ, we would not be freed of our sin until Christ returned to make all things new, and as such the whole planet would continue in sin. Of course, very few have submitted to Christ and follow Him daily, so the sin in other people's hearts is feral and rampant. Society puts Neil on trial in contempt for his music. It is not what they want, not what gives them pleasure, so it must be done away with. The jury is constantly interrupting Neil's performance (and the trial as a whole) with small talk over the pamphlet, or loud coughs, and they all try to leave before it even comes underway until Judge Cady makes them sit back down, thanks to some heavy convincing from Neil. Albert is the foreman of this jury. Kaufman and Oconner make well use of the techniques of writing that were coming into vogue at the time to create a surreal, confusing, and bleak caricature of the society they saw at the time, particularly society and its views and reactions to playwriting. Judge Cady (Mr. Cady as a judge in the illusions) puts the societal reaction into dialogue in an attempt to shatter Neil's spirits completely after McRae plays his pantomime piece on trial: "CADY: This thing of using the imagination has got to stop. We're going to make you work in the right way. You see, your talents belong to us now, and we're going to use every bit of them."[5] The "right way" is the secular way – without meaning. Neil has to stop being Neil, has to stop meaning anything, in order to appease the secular. Cady speaks for society here, and society aligns with him and he with society, but he is one person of society ultimately.
Sin is not just a big picture evil. Sin is in even the smallest of moments, and one person is capable of great sin if given just one moment to perform it. The entire play is motivated by Albert and Cynthia, people Neil look up to and trust, telling Neil to marry Gladys for the money. Neil hates the idea at first.
"ALBERT: Am I [crazy]? Think back. How did she behave this afternoon? And Papa Cady? 'Nice little share in the business?' And – well, I know what I'm talking about.
NEIL: You mean you&aspos;re seriously advising me to ask Gladys Cady to marry me?
ALBERT: That's exactly what I'm doing. She's a nice girl, and pretty. You'd have comfort and money and time-"[6]
Albert and Cynthia briefly convene, and Cynthia decides to be much more cruel than Albert was: "CYNTHIA: I said to myself, I think he's [Neil's] beginning to care about me more than he ought to, considering how we're both situated, and that nothing could come of it. And if I stay here I mightn't be sensible either. So, I'm going away."[7] Such cruel and direct treatment would of course push Neil to marry Gladys. This is intentional. Cynthia was heartless, vicious and brutal in the name of goodness. This is something we all do – we give our loved ones hard times for what we believe is best for them without consulting the Lord in prayer and fasting first, without trusting to have enough time. It was all fake, artificial, and to support the unreal is to inherently dismiss the real. Such an action must always go both ways.
Most heartbreaking of all is sin's perversion of love, also shown in Cynthia's betrayal and shown in Neil's conflict with and love of her. This is part of what prompts Cynthia to leave in the first place, Neil's love for her and her love for McRae. In the illusion, there is a brief moment with him and Cynthia. His love for Cynthia seems pure in its brief first moments, but it suffers trial by fire in the illusion. They receive a letter informing them of a performance of the orchestra Neil has been working on. Their celebration reveals a darker side to the delirium, though.
"NEIL: But, my youngest child, we must continue to eat.
CYNTHIA: But, my dear, we're extremely wealthy. Have you seen my new housekeeping book?
NEIL: No.
CYNTHIA: Look! I ruled every one of those columns myself!"[8]
Notice how there is a vague desire for survival in a system that makes such things difficult which is quickly and violently overshadowed by a desire for incomprehensible excess – the same desire that drove Albert and Cynthia to tempt Neil into the desire himself, a desire that Neil gave in to. Cynthia is also there at the very end of the dream, and she inadvertently helps Neil die in his illusions and escape that life. Once Neil wakes up from the dream, both realize the depths of their mistakes.
"CYNTHIA: It wouldn't have worked, Neil – with those people. Don"t you know it wouldn't?
NEIL: I think I do.
CYNTHIA: I've been sitting out on a bench in the square, trying to think out what it would mean – what it would do to you.
NEIL: I know. Widgets.
CYNTHIA: That would be be worse for you than any amount of poverty.
NEIL: Poverty in our cottage.
CYNTHIA: Did you think of a cottage, too?
NEIL: Of course – I lived there.
CYNTHIA: We could manage."[9]
As opposed to a desire to make a life full of glee and pleasure, they want a life together with each other, where they can cultivate their hobbies and grow as people. They seek to be good. They seek to do the right thing, and so Neil returns to his original intuitions and stays in his current situation and proposes to Cynthia, despite everything, as Cynthia returns to her own heart's true desire.
Of course, "the right thing" is usually not following your heart but letting Christ make your heart new again so that your heart might be led by Him. What will Neil find when following his heart? Will it just lead him to the evils and horrors of the modern day, only using grassroots sources? Certainly not, for the play makes clear that Neil has chosen the ultimate good by the divine intervention that allows him to marry Cynthia instead of Gladys. The Christian must know that Christ is the one in charge of life. If Christ is not the head of a person's life, such a delusional existence only has one ultimate end, an end that many who find themselves in such lives eagerly await: 'NEIL: Until I die! I can be free from you if I die! I can die! You can"t keep me from it! That's how I can get away from it! Open the door! Open the door!"[10]